We already are robots. But it doesn't matter how many billionaires are involved, money doesn't buy insight, and there's a shocking lack of that around. Plenty of hype; precious little understanding. Consciousness is one of those fields in which a lot of people say a lot of very bizarre things and don't seem to notice.

There's quite a lot of mix-ups in your nonetheless interesting question. I don't mean that to sound rude - what I mean is, there seem to be a bunch of hidden assumptions in it. For instance, the first half is speaking about "people" in general - will we as a species evolve into robots. I'm not bothered by the word "evolution" - you clearly don't mean evolution by natural selection, and it's perfectly legitimate to use that word to mean "gradually change into". But the second half of your question is about individuals - if some "consciousness" has to be uploaded, then this is a question about what some individual person might do. Somebody has to have some consciousness in the first place, to upload. People can't evolve into something that individuals have to do - that's kind of like saying "will humans ever evolve into commuting to work".

The only way that might not be true is if consciousness is some kind of "thing" in its own right - perhaps a thing that exists before we're even born - a soul that could be implanted into a baby or into a robot. This is a concept known as Cartesian Dualism. Which is wrong. It would take a book to say why it's wrong, but it's wrong. Trust me!

But that aside, what you're talking about is uploading SOMETHING to another body, in this case a man-made one. "Consciousness" can't be that something, because consciousness is not a thing. That's a huge discussion too, but think about whether you could upload poverty or prettiness into a machine and you'll perhaps get the idea.

So you don't mean uploading consciousness, you mean uploading the information which, in our brains, gives rise to those experiences we call conscious. And that, as a matter of principle, is indeed possible, unless you believe certain writers who don't know what they're talking about. It's in the nature of information that it can be "transferred" (I'll come back to those scare quotes in a moment) from one system into another. And since everything that happens inside our minds is a consequence of the state of our brains, and the state of our brains means the fine STRUCTURE of our brains, there's no reason in principle why we can't read that structure and then create a sufficiently accurate simulation of it, such that future states of that simulation would have similar "conscious" qualities and experiences. To believe otherwise is dualism, either explicitly or unconsciously.

But here's the scary bit: In the normal physical world there's a very deep conservation law that basically says, you can move stuff from one place to another, but if you do, it's now gone from the first place. In the world of cyberspace (information) that rule is reversed - you can copy stuff but you can't move it. If you want it to seem like you've moved it, you have to copy it and then destroy the original. So, leaving aside the question of whether it's feasible to scan the exact molecular configuration of someone's brain and use it to run a simulation, the result is going to be a copy. You can't MOVE yourself into a machine; you can only copy yourself there.

So imagine the day comes when you're ready to "move" into a robot. You scan your brain, the petabytes get uploaded and used to fill in the variables of a simulation and the simulation starts to behave like you. So how does it feel?

Well, for ONE of you it feels great! You look down and your hands are now made of metal. But just across the room is a guy who looks just like you used to look, and he's looking awfully disappointed! What he sees is a robot that's suddenly moving and excitedly examining its hands. What he feels inside himself is that nothing happened.

So can you cheat death like this? It depends what you mean by "you". Suddenly there are two yous. One cheats death and the other doesn't. Is that good enough? I'll leave that to you to figure out!

Right now we have no idea what consciousness is. It seems to me it may not be a question to which there's an answer. That doesn't mean I think consciousness is magical and mysterious - it means I think it's a non-question. The reasons for that would take yet another book, but from the perspective of your own question it doesn't matter. Unless some weird quantum stuff or some metaphysical constraint applies (which many people, in their sheer desperation to remain "special" try very hard to insist) then there's no reason in principle why we can't copy ourselves into robots. The result might not be how we imagine it, but that depends on the robots.

Will we? Possibly. Possibly not. Drawing a line between the existing data points and extrapolating them strikes me as pretty pointless - it would be like noting that swords tended to get shorter over history and so, here in the 21st century, everyone would be wandering around routinely carrying a one-inch sword. Futurology sucks. But I think we could. I've spent the past 40 years working on building artificial life and I've got quite good at it now, but I'm not really interested in what that means for me - it seems a bit egocentric - I'm far more interested in what it means for them.

Even so, what these questions mean for US is much more interesting than any silly science fiction. What you've done by asking the question is think about yourself slightly differently - about what it means to be alive; to have a mind, hopes, fears, anger... And we ALL need to spend a lot more time doing that, because just about everything most people think they know about these subjects is wrong! And a lot of needless heartache and conflict and hatred results from our mistakes. So I'm glad you asked!

senoritazhao Post time: 2017-5-12 14:01
We already are robots. But it doesn't matter how many billionaires are involved, money doesn't buy i ...

People who think that robots could replace human beings are more than already robots themselves.
Most of us do not understand that there are tasks that only human beings could perform but not robots could because no matter how advanced the technology of robotics could be, there is a major difference btween robot and human being.
Knowledge grows from human brains not from intelligent robots. This is but just one simple aspect.
So, fear not and ask not if robots could replace human beings.